Wikipedia has become the place to go online to start your search for information about - well, just about anything. With its launch in 2001 as an online, editable English-language encyclopedia, it quickly captured a user base and thousands of editors who monitor the articles.
Versions in other languages were quickly developed, but the with more than 6 million articles, the English Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. The numbers keep growing, but Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages. It is one of the top 5 websites visited in the world.
Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger was the one who coined its name. It is a portmanteau of "wiki" and "pedia" from encyclopedia. But what are the origins of those two words?
According to Wikipedia:
"The word encyclopedia comes from the Koine Greek ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία,[8] transliterated enkyklios paideia, meaning "general education" from enkyklios (ἐγκύκλιος), meaning "circular, recurrent, required regularly, general"[9] and paideia (παιδεία), meaning "education, rearing of a child"; together, the phrase literally translates as "complete instruction" or "complete knowledge".[10]However, the two separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error[11] by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470.[12] The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaidia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word "encyclopaedia", which in turn came into English."
The -pedia part is pretty obvious, but wiki is less obvious. Wikis existed before Wikipedia and the word is still used to describe websites with content that is specifically designed to be edited by its users. "Wiki" was first used by Ward Cunningham to describe software he wrote in 1994 that was meant to speed up the communication process between computer programmers.
Cunningham borrowed the word from the Hawaiian language, where it means "fast," after he heard it in the Honolulu airport when an employee told him to take the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" between terminals.
An erroneous etymology is that wiki is an acronym for "What I Know Is." Some people applied that definition to the word later, making it a backronym.
